Smarty Pants

The American Scholar

Tune in every other week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. A podcast from The American Scholar magazine. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  1. Weather Kids and Panther Cubs

    3d ago

    Weather Kids and Panther Cubs

    Zayd Ayers Dohrn was born underground, the son of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, two cofounders of the Weather Underground, a militant, radical leftist group of the 1970s that used tactics like the after-hours bombings of government buildings—including the Capitol, the State Department, and the Pentagon—to protest the Vietnam War and racial injustice. “When I was just 3 years old, I learned to recognize plainclothes police officers and undercover agents in a crowd,” Dohrn writes, “It was a bit like playing a game—a grown-up version of dress-up or make believe—that only my family was good at or knew all the rules.” By the time Dohrn was born in 1977, his parents had been hiding from the FBI for close to a decade, working cash jobs from San Francisco to Harlem using assumed names and forged papers. Their decision to have a family while on the run is just one of the tangled contradictions that Dohrn writes about his new book, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, which is both a family memoir and a social history of a forgotten chapter of American activism.  An acclaimed playwright and screenwriter, Zayd Ayers Dohrn is a professor at Northwestern University and director of the MFA in Writing for Screen and Stage at Northwestern University. He is the creator of the narrative podcast Mother Country Radicals and the rock protest musical Revolution(s). Go beyond the episode: Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary UndergroundListen to Mother Country RadicalsIn 2022, we interviewed another member of the underground: Laura Kaplan, a member of the Jane collective that provided abortions before Roe v. Wade Tune in every other week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    39 min
  2. For Better or for Wurst

    May 15

    For Better or for Wurst

    Summer cometh: the grills get scraped clean, the buns are split, and hungry Americans get set to boil or broil their wursts, wieners, and sausages. In the summer of 2021, Jamie Loftus drove from coast to coast, tasting the vast array of hot dogs that America has to offer, consuming as many as four a day—and in one notable (or regrettable) instance, five. Chicago-style and the Coney Island special; drive-through and deli; chili and chile: Loftus devoured them all. Her ensuing book, Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs, brings the glory and the gory. It may be the first to detail not only the different genders of pickle jars one can buy at a gas station, but also the horrific treatment of animals and workers at slaughterhouses, conditions that got distinctly worse during the pandemic. Loftus—stand-up comedian, TV writer, and creator of such illustrious one-season podcasts as “My Year in Mensa” and “Ghost Church”—joins us to talk about the wild world of that iconic American food. This episode originally aired in 2023. Go beyond the episode: Jamie Loftus’s Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot DogsProPublica’s exposé of the meatpacking industry during Covid revealed awful conditions, and government collusionDelight your senses with PBS’s classic A Hot Dog Program A few of the varieties mentioned in this episode: The Texas Tavern (not in Texas)Hungarian hot dogs … in ToledoThe baloney-wrapped hot dogs at Attman’sWhat’ll ya have at the Varsity?Ben’s Chili Bowl, where half-smokes and chili dogs reignThe Sonoran hot dog But Loftus’s top five are: Rutt’s Hut in Clifton, New JerseyHot Dog Ruiz Los Chipilones in Tucson, ArizonaKing Jong Grillin in Portland, OregonThe hot dog carts across the street from the Crypto.com Arena, or near Union Station in Los Angeles, CaliforniaTexas Tavern in Roanoke, Virginia Tune in every other week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    23 min
  3. Learn the Ropes of Estate Sailing

    May 1

    Learn the Ropes of Estate Sailing

    No place is better suited to those with a taste for champagne but a beer budget than the humble estate sale. Its various guises—be they church rummage sales, yard sales, or online auctions—offer a variety of ways to acquire quality pieces and a little bit of history, with the bonus of saving grandma’s treasures from the landfill. For several years, vintage enthusiast Kate Davis has been writing a popular weekly newsletter, Midwestern Estate Sailing, that not only spotlights upcoming sales of note but offers a guide for the uninitiated. Her new book, Bring Cash, distills those lessons (the first one is in the title) along with essays about favorite finds and what to look for: dovetail joints in furniture, finished seams in clothing, the sign-in sheet at the front of the line so you’re not the last one admitted into the designer’s midcentury bungalow. Davis joins the podcast this week to talk about what she’s learned from estate sailing, her term for the ritual of trekking out to someone’s house and wandering its halls for treasure—which is almost always sure to include at least one inexplicable maritime tchotchke. Go beyond the episode: Kate Davis’s Bring Cash: A Guide to Estate Sales in the Midwest and BeyondHer newsletter, Midwestern Estate SailingFor more on the afterlives of secondhand stuff, listen to our interviews with Adam Minter (on global thrifting) and Dana Thomas (on fast fashion) Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    24 min
  4. Safe From Sin

    Apr 17

    Safe From Sin

    “Medieval psychology” might sound nearly a millennium out of date, irrelevant to modern science, with its reassurances of cognitive data and peer-reviewed studies. But we often say that Shakespeare’s 400-year old plays communicate the human condition, and that wouldn’t be possible if the Bard didn’t have a deep understanding of what makes our minds tick. Rewind the clock just 200 years further and you’ll find, with the help of a Middle English glossary, that the autobiographical writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe—not to mention Chaucer—seem achingly familiar in their yearning, their humor, and their determination. We’re not so different, mentally, from our forebears, and beyond literature, medieval writings on morality and psychology have a lot to offer us. But since cracking open a vellum manuscript to read cramped Latin text is beyond most of us, historian Peter Jones can be our guide in his new book, Self-Help from the Middle Ages. And the starting point for much medieval guidance on living a better life is quite familiar: the Seven Deadly Sins, which were less a catalog of forbidden behaviors than a path to self-knowledge. Just ask Dante.   Go beyond the episode: Peter Jones’s Self-Help from the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About LivingFor more about medieval women’s religious experience of food, you can’t do better than Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy FastGuillaume de Deguileville’s The Pilgrimage of Human Life, in scanned manuscript or translationBernard of Clairvaux’s The Steps of Humility and Pride Thomas Aquinas’s works are available online in a free side-by-side translationDon’t sleep on the early Christian mystics: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Catherine of Siena   Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    37 min
  5. Hue and Cry

    Apr 3

    Hue and Cry

    Defining words is hard, no matter what they are, but the difficulty only doubles when the word in question is a purely visual referent like color. How do you define blue? Or red, or green, or—God forbid—pink? Well, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary has this to say about teal duck, sense two, which transcends its origin as waterfowl: “a dark greenish blue that is bluer and duller than average teal, averaging teal blue, drake, or duckling.” Elegant. Fun, even, for a dictionary, whose defining characteristic is kind of to be dull as dust—which raises the question of how and why some of these colorful definitions came to be. That’s the subject of lexicographer Kory Stamper’s new book, True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color–from Azure to Zinc Pink, which takes her from the pink and buff archives of Merriam-Webster’s offices to the warring color standards of the early 20th century, from the glossy pages of the Sears & Roebuck catalog to the trenches of World War I.  Go beyond the episode: Kory Stamper’s True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color–from Azure to Zinc PinkRead Scholar executive editor Bruce Falconer’s essay, “What Is the Perfect Color Worth?” on the inscrutable world of color forecasting Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    37 min
  6. Shotgun Ornithology

    Mar 20

    Shotgun Ornithology

    Songbirds are disappearing at an alarming rate, with some species teetering on the verge of extinction, barely clinging to their endangered habitats. Birders, not to mention scientists, are sounding the alarm. But true as these words are today, they also describe the 19th century, and the valiant—and occasionally violent—efforts to protect birds from the utter devastation of human activity. This is the subject of James H. McCommons's new book, The Feather Wars. Birds were threatened by aggressive logging, farming, hunting, sport, and the desire to put a feather in a woman's cap. But they were also imperiled by the very people who claimed to love them—ornithologists, and their kindred oologists, whose hobby consisted of killing thousands upon thousands of birds and collecting their eggs to fluff out their collections. McCommons takes us behind the battle lines of the first American effort to save the birds, in the hopes that some lessons might apply to our current circumstances. Go beyond the episode: James H. McCommons’s The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America’s BirdsGet to know the birds in your back yard with eBird from the Cornell Lab of OrnithologyLearn how to garden for wildlifeRead this viral essay about keeping your cat indoors: “The Domestic Cat: Bird Killer, Mouser and Destroyer of Wild Life; Means of Utilizing and Controlling It” (1916) Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    31 min
  7. Eulogy for a Yenta

    Mar 6

    Eulogy for a Yenta

    In a cramped rent-controlled apartment on the lousy end of the Upper East Side, a dying woman in a diaper writes the story of her life. She is Barbara Rosenberg, high on OxyContin and determined to explain herself, if not exactly apologize, to the two people she loved most: her estranged trans son and her best friend, Sugar Becker, whose betrayals she has yet to forgive. This delirious monologue is the heart of Jordy Rosenberg’s new novel, Night Night Fawn, which gives voice to Barbara’s deepest disappointments about her friends, her family, her in-laws, and maybe, if she’s being honest, her own silver-screen aspirations. But Barbara’s most unhinged thoughts—about serving cold cuts at a funeral or the lesbian perils of a corduroy jacket; the schmucks of 1960s Flatbush or bad 1980s nose jobs; Karl Marx or yenta science—reach a crescendo with the unexpected reappearance of her long-lost loves. Mentioned in this episode: Jordy Rosenberg’s Night Night FawnGillian Rose’s Mourning Becomes the LawMichelle de Kretser’s Theory & PracticeSophie Lewis’s Enemy FeminismsRoberto Bolano’s By Night in Chile, translated by Chris AndrewsAdania Shibli’s Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth JaquetteJordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox (listen to our 2018 interview here)Amy Kaplan’s Our American IsraelGretchen Felker-Martin’s ManhuntGrace Byron’s HerculineZefyr Lisowksi’s Uncanny Valley GirlsTorrey Peters’s Stag Dance and Detransition, BabyAnd, of course, Karl Marx’s Capital (best read with an introduction) Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    29 min
  8. The Carnifex of Čachtice

    Feb 20

    The Carnifex of Čachtice

    Elizabeth Bathory is alleged to have been the most prolific serial killer of all time, responsible for butchering as many as 650 virgins and bathing in their blood. Her Hungarian water castles are the sites of gruesome ghost tours, a metal band named itself for her, and for years she was in the Guinness Book of World Records. The number of women she’s said to have killed is four times the population of an average 17th-century village, but when it comes to Bathory’s story, even the Guinness Book concedes that “it is impossible to separate fact from fiction.” Shelley Puhak disagrees: In her new book,The Blood Countess, she contends that Bathory was instead the victim of possibly the greatest misinformation campaign in history, brought against a powerful, wealthy woman at a tumultuous time. Lutherans and Calvinists were at one another's throats at the height of the Protestant Reformation, the Ottoman Empire lurked just across the border, and medicine in upheaval, with both new and old practices bringing accusations of heresy and witchcraft. It was a dark time to be a woman—especially one with 17 castles to her name, and no husband to defend her. Go beyond the episode: Shelley Puhak's The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    38 min
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About

Tune in every other week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. A podcast from The American Scholar magazine. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Information

  • Creator
    The American Scholar
  • Years Active
    2016 - 2026
  • Episodes
    343
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © The American Scholar
  • Show Website
    Smarty Pants

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